Spidersong
by TheBigCat
Summary: There are cobwebs in the library.


_Written originally as part of a larger AU thing, but I felt that it stood alone pretty well. For the purpose of this tale, Ace is a student (second or third year, can't remember) at Hogwarts, and Seven is the Alchemy Professor there._

 _Merry Christmas!_

* * *

 **Spidersong**

* * *

"You're drinking tea in the library?" Ace says when she finds him, tucked between the R and S shelves of the nonmagical nonfiction section. "Professor, I knew you were bonkers, but this is just borderline suicidal."

He just grins at her and raises his blue china teacup from its saucer, as if saluting her. "You don't want any?"

She makes a vague noise of utter disbelief, "Madame Pince's gonna murder us," and drops her satchel on the ground next to the table before taking a seat across from him with an affectionate roll of her eyes and a nod. She folds her arms on the table, rests her head in them, and watches as he conjures another ornately-patterned bone china cup and saucer from thin air (literally, there's a shower of faint blue sparks that cascades around them) and pours the tea that he really shouldn't have with him neatly into the cup. It floats into her outstretched hand, and she knows before even taking a sip that it's the perfect temperature for drinking - not scaldingly hot, not uncomfortably lukewarm.

No amount of grumbling about how she should really be wrapping her Christmas presents at the moment; she's left it for entirely too long, and how they're both going to actually literally die if the school librarian catches them is going to change the fact that the Professor's green tea is the best. So Ace just sips at her tea, enjoying the slight bitterness to the blend and the faintest hint of mint that's only barely there, and she waits for him to pull out the inevitable pocket snacks. He doesn't disappoint. After a few minutes, they've split a nearly-forgotten bar of chocolate and half a batch of cinnamon-peanut butter cookies between them.

"Seriously, we may die," Ace warns him, brushing crumbs off her tie. "Pince will literally have our heads, I think. I've heard horror stories."

"I know," says the Professor cheerfully. "I do believe I started the original rumors, in fact, although all legends do have a basis in reality..." He trailed off for a second, and then shrugged in a morbidly optimistic sort of way. "Nonetheless, being dead might be an interesting change. I could use the rest."

"Professor." Ace tries to put all of her exasperation towards him into that one word, although it's hard to be annoyed with him when he's pulled her out from the distractingly raucous deathtrap that the Gryffindor common room is currently on (apparently) entirely legitimate reasons. "Please tell me you didn't call me here just for a tea party."

"Whyever not?" His eyes go up in that particular way they do when he's attempting to be deliberately obtuse. "Tea parties are rather good fun, aren't they?"

"They are, and the cookies were great, but," she sighed, "there's always an ulterior motive with you. Can't you just cut to the chase? I do have things to do, y'know."

"Hm." It's non-committal, not confirming or denying anything. He sets down his own cup of tea, which he's finished already, and after a second makes it Vanish completely - saucer and all. "Ace," he says seriously.

"That's me," she says, nodding.

"I noticed, yes. Ace, have you noticed anything..." He hesitates for a moment, "shall we say, unusual about our surroundings in the library this fine afternoon?"

"Besides the vertically-challenged Scottish professor attempting to bribe me with drinks and baked goods from across the table?" she ventures, and then winces when he directs a not-entirely-serious glare in her direction. "All right, all right, give me a second." She sits back in her chair, and scans the library from where they're sitting. The library is utterly silent - not really surprising, considering its fierce caretaker. "Professor, I can't hear or see anything. There's nothing going on here."

"Precisely," he says, putting a hard trill on the R. "Did you see any other students, coming in? Or perhaps, the dreaded Madame Pince?"

She stares at him for a second or two. Yes, the library tends to be pretty empty during the winter break - especially considering it's Christmas Eve - but there's usually at least one or two people milling around aimlessly. "I... didn't."

"Exactly as I feared," he mutters, and then stands up abruptly, Vanishing the last of the tea - cups, teapot, everything - as he does so. "Come along, Ace," he says. "Bring your jacket, it's cold where we're going."

"I didn't -" she begins, instinctively - Hogwarts teachers tend to react in a negative way to her preferred code of dress, with 'negative' generally meaning 'ten points from Gryffindor' - but the Professor sees right through it, with another raise of his eyebrows. Of course.

She bends down and goes digging through her satchel, coming out at last with the large black bomber jacket that has been deemed as inappropriate school uniform for as long as she can remember. The pockets jingle as she throws it on, and so do the numerous badges of varying color and design that she's pinned onto it over the years.

"Excellent," says the Professor in the tone of voice that implies that he really does think it's rather excellent, and conjures an umbrella, drawing its outline in the air with his wand and catching it as it coalesces into existence. Large, black, and with a molded red handle in the shape of a cartoonish question mark. He stows the wand in his pocket, and hooks the umbrella over an arm, glancing over at Ace, who has just finished adjusting her satchel to hang over her shoulder in the way that she wants it to. "Shall we?"

"Probably," Ace says, shrugging, and accepts the offer of Dubious Adventure by means of following him when he begins to wind his way through the shelves. "Although I have no idea what's going on. Are you saying that someone - something's - been kidnapping students? Also," she adds, frowning, "it's cold where we're going? Where are we going?"

"All excellent questions," he says evasively, and neatly sidesteps her annoyed, forceful swipe at his arm. "...which I will now proceed to answer now, in order." He pulls her through a row of shelves and deeper into the library. "No, I doubt that someone or something has been kidnapping anyone, somebody would have noted the disappearances by now. I rather suspect that whatever it is is simply... acting as a deterrent."

"So there is something in here?" Ace pulls her jacket tighter around her, and then does up the zip for good measure. "Really don't like the sound of that."

"Perhaps," the Professor allows, "although I could be wrong." He frowns. "It's rare, but it happens."

"I haven't noticed anybody missing," says Ace.

He hums a short, formless melody for a second, and then sighs deeply. The temperature where they are has decreased slightly, and the lights are getting less and less frequent, so the breath comes out as ghostly, barely-visible mist. "When the fog came to our town," he said quietly, "we heeded the warnings and gathered every day to count our numbers."

Ace, who has been keeping pace with him quite evenly all this time, turns her head to glance at him curiously. He isn't looking at her; instead staring quite distantly into the endless rows of shelves and books.

"How proud we were after a week with no one taken," he continues, the words a slow, measured litany - his storytelling voice. Despite herself, Ace feels a shiver tingle up and down her spine. "How proud after a month with all of us accounted for. It was only when the fog cleared that we looked out at our proud town and saw too many empty homes."

He stops, having emerged at the end of a row. Ace comes to a stop too, nearly colliding with a shelf. "It was only then that we began to realize the fog had not spared us." His voice is a whisper now. "We had simply forgotten the ones it took."

There is complete, echoing silence that Ace almost doesn't want to break. After a second, she mutters, "Professor..."

He spins around, tapping his umbrella tip against the ground, and offers her a beaming, childish smile. "In response to your other question - we have been heading to the Restricted Section!"

The whiplash-like quality of this moodswing startles her for a moment, and by the time she's regained her senses, he's off again - moving away from her to the towers of chain-locked bookshelves that she now recognizes. She hurries after him. "The Restricted Section?"

"Yes - not to worry, you have permission." Again, that smile, although she's now aware that it has a slightly forced quality to it. "For some unknown reason, the Hogwarts School Library tends to get chillier the deeper you go into it. Had you noticed?"

She hasn't, and she shakes her head to indicate that.

"Not many people do, not to worry," he says, and starts hunting in his pockets. Out came scraps of fabric, scraps of paper, a shoelace or two, what looked like an entire (untouched) cupcake, bits of sealing wax, and finally a rusted golden key. He tosses it from hand to hand and regards it for a moment. "Funnily enough, the temperature changes have been getting markedly more dramatic as of late, even factoring in the time of year. I ran tests this morning."

"Great," says Ace, "so the library now has human pest control, and is developing its own interior climate. Sounds about par for the course 'round here. Do we really need to be worried?"

"I don't know." The Professor steps up to the gate, the one that stand between the average student and vast tomes of ancient knowledge, and slips the key into the lock. "That's what we're here to find out." It turns easily, and the chains unravel, slipping backwards into the darkness like sinister metallic snakes, complete with hisses and rattles and unsettling slithering.

Ace and the Professor wait until the noises abate; until the library is utterly silent once more. Then they exchange a significant glance, and then she nods and he twirls his umbrella like a cane and they set off into the Restricted Section with the somberness that you'd usually reserve for entering a mausoleum.

Ace doesn't talk at first, instead electing to just follow the Professor to - well, to wherever. He's distracted; running his fingers along and over the spines of books that catch his eye, and letting out the occasional hiss of annoyance when a book decides to snap its cover menacingly at him.

"Professor," she says after a while of this, and after he nearly loses an entire finger to the Mare Monstrum, Mare Nostrum (and subsequently seems to decide to keep his fingers to himself). "There's... things in here with us."

"There frequently are," he says, and tilts his head curiously at her. "What sort of things?"

"I don't know, but they keep whispering to me." She shivers as one brushes past her ear, blowing a few strands of hair out of place. Glitz loved me, but I didn't love him back, says this one, ghosting past, fingertips just barely able to touch her. "Professor, what are these things?"

He takes a moment to answer, frowning distractedly at a copy of something called the Necronomicon (1668). "They're... well, I suppose the best thing to call them would be 'memories'."

"Like... ghosts?" Ace doesn't like ghosts. In her opinion, the dead should stay as they are. The pale copies that magic occasionally produces are nothing like the real deal. She's pretty sure the Professor feels the same, although he's never stated it outright.

"Not exactly," he says, smiling, "considering that you don't have to be dead to join them. They're only accretions, Ace. The dandruff of the spiritual world. A collection of thoughts and wishes and dreams and hopes; the accumulation of everybody that's ever passed through here."

I cheated on my Transfiguration exam, confides a Memory, drifting by them.

"They can be unsettling," he adds, slowing so he can glance at her properly, "and rather irritating, too, but they're ultimately harmless, Ace."

"I..." She trails off, and then moves forwards to fall into step with him once more. "Let's keep going, yeah?"

It's maybe five minutes later when they start noticing the cobwebs. They're light at first, but they grow thicker and thicker until Ace has to pull out her pocketknife and the Professor is swatting rather ineffectually at them with his umbrella, grimacing. By the time the cobwebs start to thin out again, the two of them are plastered in sticky greyish-black threads and fibers. It would be almost comical in any other circumstances.

"Giant spiders again, I see," Ace sighs, leaning against a bookcase.

"Perhaps," says the Professor, evasive as ever, and kindly allows her a minute or so to catch her breath, before urging her onward.

The library only gets darker and darker as they carry on. Five rows of web-covered books later, Ace lights up the tip of her wand with a hastily muttered 'Lumos' so as to actually see where she's going, and two rows after that, it's gotten so depressingly dim that the Professor has to add his own light to hers as well. And it doesn't even help that much. The wand-light barely pierces the gloom, and they can only barely see each other. Eventually, they're more-or-less stumbling about blindly in the darkness.

Ace is relying mostly on the fact that the Professor's whistling Italian opera ever-so-softly somewhere in front of her to guide her. And it's getting colder, much colder. Even with her bomber jacket, which she's really glad she brought along, she's shivering noticeably, and feels utterly chilled to the bone.

It's the Professor's gentle hand on her arm that brings her to a halt. He brings up his glowing wandtip between them, throwing wild shadows across both their faces. "Do you hear that?"

"What, the sound of cryptic, rhetorical statements being thrown at me?" Ace retorts, her voice a bit croaky from not having spoken for a while. She coughs slightly to clear it.

"No, not that," he mutters, infuriatingly immune to sarcasm. "Listen-"

Ace shuts up for the moment and listens.

There's... something. She can't quite figure out what. It's not the sound of Memoriea, drifting past shelves and whispering secrets and slander - their appearances had dwindled down to none almost ten minutes ago. And it's not the rustling of the pages of the sentient books, either. No, this noise is intermittent yet purposeful; distant yet strangely close. Breathing. Clicking. Hissing. Waiting.

"Is that what we're looking for?" Ace breathes near-silently after a moment, the words still too loud for her liking.

The Professor nods. His eyes are shining wide and dark in the dim light. "I suspect so," he tells her equally as quietly.

"It doesn't sound friendly," she says. She's not afraid, of course. Ace McShane isn't afraid of anyone or anything, and would happily fight a Dark Lord barehanded if there was even the sliver of a chance that she would win. But there's a difference between fear and caution, and there is something about the sound of whatever's lurking behind the next row of shelves that makes her want to heavily exercise that caution as much as she can. "Are you sure we should be -"

"Ace," says the Professor, "to use a surprising apt idiom for the situation - don't judge a book by its cover. Or an unknown entity by the quality of its menacing growls, anyway." And then when she gives him a Look, he relents and amends this statement slightly: "at any rate, if it does turn out to be - ah, hostile, shall we say - don't forget we have a very powerful weapon on our side."

Ace brightens almost instantly. "The Reductor curse!"

"Diplomacy," the Professor corrects, looking miffed. "Not every dangerous situation I bring you into is an excuse to wield destructive curses, Ace..."

She grins. "You sure about that?"

"No," he says firmly, and then: "well, maybe. Sometimes. Come along," he insists, before the conversation can progress any further, and he sets off into the dark once more. His light is quickly swallowed up by the disturbingly dense darkness. Ace is abruptly reminded of what they're supposed to be doing here. She viciously suppresses the urge to run in the opposite direction, fast, and hurries after him before she loses sight of him again.

She rounds a corner, following the dim light, and smacks straight into his outstretched black umbrella, which he's held out as a sort of makeshift barrier to stop her moving forward. She frowns, trying to looks at him. He's put out the light at the end of his wand, and her own is so faint at this point that it's utterly useless anyway. "Professor, what-?"

"Shh!" he hisses loudly, and points, and oh no it's huge.

Spindly legs, too many of them to count, stretching out in all directions so as to teach every corner of the tangled, blackened web it's sitting in the middle of. At the edges of the web are large, neatly wrapped parcels, bound in the same thick thread that the web is made out of. Its many iridescent eyes are gleaming like opals, opening and shutting at irregular intervals. There are shiny viscous threads of something dark and unidentifiable dripping from its fangs, and it's most definitely making that same rattling, hissing noise they had heard earlier.

"Gordon Bennet," Ace breathes.

"A Nightweaver," says the Professor in the same even, you-should-be-fascinated-in-what-I'm-saying tone that he tends to use for Alchemy lectures and telling her off for experimenting with high explosives in the Potions labs. "Distantly yet distinctly related to the Acromantula and the Lethifold both - it's been rumoured to have been crossbreed from the two species over a great deal many generations, as a matter of fact." She can feel the grin on his face, even though it's impossible to see him from where she is. "Also, extremely rare. We're very lucky to see a specimen in the wild, Ace!"

"I don't feel very lucky right now," she says, digging about in her jacket pockets for something explosive. "What's it doing here?"

"Weaving, I'd wager," he says distractedly, and senses her confusion in the borderline-telepathic way that most teachers seem to be able to. "The clue's in the name, Ace. Nightweavers feed on knowledge and obscurity much in the way that regular arachnids will feast on the common fly."

"I -" She tries to work out just how something is supposed to eat obscurity, and then dismisses it as a theatrical metaphor. "All right. So, the web-?"

"Is quite literally woven from threads of liquid darkness, which the creature produces itself through a complicated process which you would no doubt find utterly confusing if explained," he says. "A biological miracle, and fiendishly difficult to untangle yourself from."

Ace's eyes fall upon the unmoving parcels wrapped in threads of blackness, and swallows hard, realizing. Flies, trapped in a spider's web. "The missing students..."

He seems to follow her gaze. His enthusiasm diminishes considerably when he apparently comes to the same conclusion as her. "Yes. I'm afraid so."

"We've got to do something."

"Yes," he agrees. "Do you know any cutting spells?"

She nods, seeing where he's going with this. "Professor - whatever you're planning, be careful."

"When am I not?" he says, and pats her once on the shoulder. "I should be telling you the same thing."

She shoots him a thumbs-up, and moves away as quickly and quietly as possible. She comes to the first web cocoon, and, using it as cover so the Nightweaver won't see her, sets about trying to work out the best way to break it open.

Somewhere far to her right, she hears footsteps, and then a rattling hiss, and she tenses up, ready to move to the Professor's aid at the first sign of trouble. But nothing happens for a very long time, and then there is a noise that pierces the air, and makes her jump because she hadn't been expecting it. But it's not a dangerous hiss, or a cry of anger, or the sound of fangs piercing skin. No.

The Professor is singing.

That's strange in itself, because he's the sort of person that you really can't ever picture doing so, and Ace honestly can't remember a single time that he ever joined in with the school song, or really produced any sort of music apart from humming absently (or playing those wretched spoons of his, but that doesn't really count as music anyway, as far as she's concerned). But calling what he's doing singing is like comparing a kindergartner to a graduate student, because the noises coming out of his mouth are barely human. They're shining, warm strands of melody and music that almost seem to glow. And as Ace pauses in her task of cutting people out of the dark webs to stare in disbelief, she sees him smile, and then hears him split the singular line of melody apart into a ringing, two-toned harmony.

This is immensely startling, but then she reminds herself what she should be doing right now and gets back to it. She quickly and inelegantly splits open the webbed cocoons, careful not to cut the people inside by accident. The students inside go sprawling across the floor, still covered in fragments of sticky webbing, mumbling and moaning indistinctly.

The Professor is still singing, behind her, wordlessly, and the music splits again, this time so there's a full, three-note chord. She risks another glance. The Nightweaver has stopped spinning webs and darkness, and is eyeing him inscrutably - but not moving any closer towards any of them, so whatever he's trying to do must be working, right?

Ten students are now free. She eyes the remainder - there's maybe six left for her to rescue, and one of the cocoons is slightly bigger than the rest. The Professor has moved closer to the Nightweaver, and is holding out his hands, as if in a gesture of good faith. This is enough of an opening for her to be able to dash across, behind its back, and start cutting open the last of the trapped people here.

The melody fluctuates between major and minor, and it's almost as if the Professor's giving some sort of speech to the arachnoid creature, and for a moment or two it feels like he's wavering slightly, maybe on the edge of giving up. And then the creature's own voice joins his; singing in counterpoint - an essential obbligato that completes the song, makes it whole.

With two quick strokes of her wand, the last of the captives are free, and Ace sees that in addition to the fifteen-odd students on the floor, Madame Pince, the librarian, is there too. Her job is more-or-less done here, so she turns back to the Professor, and sees him laughing as he sings, face crinkled up with delight. He turns slightly, catches her eye, and nods.

And then he ends the song.

Ace skids to a halt next to him and manages to catch his arm just as he stumbles backwards, preventing him from falling over. She's almost ridiculously relieved when he opens his eyes and grins at her - and she can see him properly now; the library is a lot brighter than it was before. And more than that - the Nightweaver is dismantling its web, piece by piece, rolling it up neatly and skirting around the still-unconscious people who are scattered all over the floor.

"Did you do it?" she asks, more-or-less knowing already what the answer is.

He reaches over and taps her neatly on the nose. "Yes, Ace," he tells her. "We did it."

She grins. "Wicked," she says. "What exactly did we do?"

"Diplomacy, as always, is the best tool at our disposal," he says. "In this case, I merely had to find a way to communicate with it in a way that it would understand. And once we came to an agreement, it was quite simple to inform it that what it was doing was wrong, and how there are much better places for a creature such as itself to take up residence."

"And the students?"

"Will wake up shortly, and hopefully without any memory of the events that just passed," he says.

The Nightweaver chitters out a string of long, melodic notes. This seems to be some form of communication, because the Professor nods, and pushes away from Ace. "Yes," he says, apparently to it, "it's time to go."

He must see her reluctant glance towards the students she's just rescued, because he says, "they'll be fine. It's best that they don't know we were here, anyway."

She shrugs, trying to affect nonchalance. "Whatever you say, Professor. Where are we going?"

He smiles and taps a finger to the side of his nose. "Out," he says.

And they lead the Nightweaver out of the library, and then out of the castle, in a short, bizarre procession - the giant spider-like creature following them in an almost subdued manner, ducking under low-hanging shelves and ceiling ornaments. Soon, they're all outside in the chilly evening air and Ace and the Professor are standing on the lawn, watching the Nightweaver picking its way through the snow, skittering off into the Forest and out of sight.

"Will it be all right, do you think?" she asks when it's gone.

"I'm almost certain that it will be," he says, leaning on his umbrella. "The Forest is full of all number of obscure secrets and places - it's a veritable feast for a Nightweaver of that maturity. I wouldn't worry."

"Good," she says, and bundles her jacket up around her against the bracing cold. Snow is beginning to fall around them, and it's catching in her hair and on her shoulders, but they stay out there for a while longer, watching the serene, silent landscape.

Behind them, the castle clock chimes the hour, loud and grand. It's nine o'clock, and all is well.

* * *

When the students, led cautiously but firmly by Madame Pince, file out of the darkest, deepest, coldest area of the Library, there are no people waiting for them in the main area near the doors. There is some confusion of course, because nobody is quite sure of what's going on or how they ended up in the Restricted Section in the first place, or what they should be doing now, but eventually the students begin to file out of the Library on groups and pairs, heading back to the sanctuary of their common rooms and friends. It's Christmas Eve, after all - a time to smile and enjoy the company of friends and acquaintances and families that might not be related by blood so much as found quite by accident.

And all over the castle, it is peaceful.

Back in the library, Madame Pince is exhausted and confused, but is doing her best to tidy up as she would usually do at the end of the day. She moves shakily, and if any students had been within the library at that very moment and had dared to cross her path, they probably would not have survived the encounter.

But when she reaches the space between the R and S shelves of the nonmagical nonfiction section, she stops dead in her tracks, and stares. Because there, sitting comfortably at one of the study desks with wrapping paper torn and ripped all over the desk's surface and the ground are two people - a young Gryffindor student examining an assortment of various magical and non-magical badges and pins with delight, and a teacher, the Alchemy Professor, no less. And he's wearing possibly the ugliest hand-knitted Christmas sweater ever known to mankind with the sort of utter pride and glee that comes from knowing full well how terrible it is but appreciating the love put into it so much that any sort of cares about appearance are meaningless.

The two of them have been talking and laughing together for quite some time now, and they look up at her sudden appearance. The Alchemy Professor has a full blue China tea set and is carefully heating up the pot with the tip of his wand.

Before Madame Pince can make the automatic objection about no food or drink in the library at any time, the professor suddenly grins - boyishly and disarmingly. "Well," he says, and taps a teacup with the back of a spoon, causing it to clink pleasantly. "It seems you're just in time for tea!"

The girl, who initially looked very tentative about Pince's arrival, smiles too. "Pull up a chair!" she invites, and cautiously, she does.

The professor serves tea. It's hot and sweet and delicious and calms the quiver in her hands that she couldn't quite get rid of until now. The company is good, conversation is low and mild, and Madame Pince knows that this is the best Christmas Eve she's had in nearly decades.

Slowly, she smiles. Outside, the snow continues to fall.

Long ago, once upon an Scottish Christmastime.


End file.
